Please note, this blog contains material that might distress some readers.

The neurosurgeon took one look at the MRI and shook his head.

“It’s hopeless. Let him die.”

A deafening silence drowned the senses. My heart sank. Time appeared to slow.

The doctor had meant well. He had seen many construction workers with similar catastrophic spine injuries fade away, alone, as bed sores led to rotting flesh and the stench deterred relatives from visiting.

But he was talking about my colleague, a talented young reporter named Peter Apps, whom I had hired to join Reuters’ Sri Lanka bureau just months earlier. Peter’s neck was shattered when the minibus our multimedia team was travelling in to cover a feature on child soldier recruitment crashed into a road siding in eastern Sri Lanka, near the front lines of a grinding civil war on Sept 5, 2006.

A mad dash to see the then defense secretary to seek help to evacuate our team from a no-fly zone. Canvassing embassies to identify the country’s best surgeon during a frantic wait on a military airstrip. And then there I was, grabbing the neurosurgeon’s arm, frog-marching him to his own car, and making him drive me across Colombo to another hospital where Peter lay, pleading with him to perform an 8-hour operation to stabilize him.

With the consent of Peter and his parents, both doctors back in England, as his guardian on the ground I signed a form authorizing the doctor to do the unimaginable -- remove shattered vertebrae and replace them with a metal rod in the sure knowledge that he would never walk again, barring a quantum leap in medicine.

Nothing prepares you for this.

There weren’t many nurses available. So, before the surgery, I tried my hand at massaging Peter’s legs myself, looking for synapses to fire. And suddenly, there were flickers of movement. Our spirits soared. Then crashed. Cruelly, the movements were involuntary spasms, not the path to a seemingly miraculous recovery.

“Smother me!”

What do you say to a plea like that? We thrived on black humor, a defense mechanism to deal with the darker side of humanity that you see on this job. So, I told Peter there was plenty of time for a pillow over the face, but that it would only get me into hot water so we may as well exhaust all other avenues first.

I was 33 and half-way through my first bureau chief job. Peter was 25. That was 12-1/2 years ago.

The most resilient person I know, Peter survived. He works today both as a global affairs columnist for Reuters and running a think tank he founded, Project for the Study of the 21st Century. He has written a best-selling Kindle e-book about Winston Churchill, is a lieutenant in the British Army Reserves and still travels the globe for work, crisscrossing the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary given the complexities of traveling with a bulky motorized wheelchair.

I can only marvel at his tenacity, his rejection of the catastrophic situation he faced. His fast adoption of voice-activated software. His pragmatism.

Several weeks after the surgery, once Peter was stable enough to travel, a jet arrived to whisk him and his mother back to the UK to begin rehabilitation.

I fell to my knees at the airport as I watched the plane take off. Overwhelmed with impotence, with grief, mourning, with guilt. If I hadn’t hired him in the first place, this would never have happened. If I had simply said no to the trip. If we had traveled at a different time. Hired a different driver. How to turn back the clock? How to change places and take the burden off him?

I feel it somehow ruptured my soul.

Coverage in Sri Lanka at the time was a daily diet of attacks. And while Peter’s plight was always front of mind, from my perspective, a busy journalistic file coupled with daily judgments on what we could and couldn’t report safely kept my mind focused.

Then came the invasion of dreams.

In one recurring nightmare, oddly in black and white, I would be staring into water, and a silhouette would rise to the surface. The last image before I would wake up, as the ripples on the water subsided, was a ghostly white, withered, atrophied body. Then Peter’s face.

And there were the vivid flashbacks. Transported by a sound, a smell, the balmy warmth of a summer day. I figured those were due to near misses during aerial bombings and rocket attacks or triggered by scenes of death you can’t unsee. Like the nightmares, they persisted for many years.

Roadside bombings intensified in Sri Lanka. After a couple that were way too close for comfort, my wife and year-old child moved back to Argentina to be with her father, who was dying from terminal cancer diagnosed just as we moved to Asia. I stayed for another five months to cover the conflict, before moving to Chile, the opening nearest to Argentina at the time. My son didn’t recognize me.

The nightmares and flashbacks remained. And then, a couple of years later, for no apparent reason, I hit a wall. I was consumed by the same overwhelming grief I had felt ever since the accident. I tried to plough through it by immersing myself in work. I took up cycling so I’d be too tired to dwell. I would ride 20 km every night through the hills of Santiago in the dark. Then 50 or 60 on Sunday. Now based in Hong Kong, I try to work through it practicing an internal, mindful form of Kung Fu called Wing Chun.

I couldn’t shake it. I ended up sitting in a room in Chile with a psychotherapist. All I was really looking for was a way to move past the grief, or at least a pressure valve.

I was advised to focus on something positive in my life. So, I focused on my young son, and it helped.

My mind still drifts every day, often several times, to Peter. The grief and the mourning persist. The gnawing knowledge that I cannot make it right, will never be able to make it up to him.

It has become a part of me.

Based in Hong Kong, Simon Gardner is General Manager, Asia. Prior to that he was bureau chief for Mexico and Central America. During his 20 years with Reuters, Simon has also had postings to Argentina, Sri Lanka and Chile and worked in other countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba. Simon is also a member of the peer network. As he says: “Working in challenging conditions can take a real toll on our reporters, and I’ve always viewed providing pastoral care as a core part of my roles. So I was delighted when Reuters created the peer network, a group of colleagues who lend an empathetic ear and serve as a resource for colleagues facing difficulties, and it’s why I signed up.”

This blog post first circulated internally on April 9, 2019.

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